Question

I was accidentally working on a branch I shouldn’t have been for a while, so I branched off of it giving it the appropriate name. Now I want to overwrite the branch I shouldn’t have been on to the version from origin (github). Is there an easy way to do this? I tried deleting the branch and then resetting up the tracking branch, but it just gives me the version I was working on again.

Answer 1

If you haven’t pushed to origin yet, you can reset your branch to the upstream branch with:

git checkout mybranch
git reset --hard origin/mybranch

(Make sure that you reference your latest commit in a separate branch, like you mention in your question)

Note that just after the reset, mybranch@{1} refers to the old commit, before reset.

But if you had already pushed, see “Create git branch, and revert original to upstream state” for other options.

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With Git 2.23 (August 2019), that would be one command: git switch.
Namely: git switch -C mybranch origin/mybranch

Example

C:\Users\vonc\git\git>git switch -C master origin/master
Reset branch 'master'
Branch 'master' set up to track remote branch 'master' from 'origin'.
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

That restores the index and working tree, like a git reset --hard would.

---

As commented by Brad Herman, a reset --hard would remove any new file or reset modified file to HEAD.

Actually, to be sure you start from a “clean slate”, a git clean -f -d after the reset would ensure a working tree exactly identical to the branch you just reset to.

---

This blog post suggests those aliases (for master branch only, but you can adapt/extend those):

[alias]
   resetorigin = !git fetch origin && git reset --hard origin/master && git clean -f -d
   resetupstream = !git fetch upstream && git reset --hard upstream/master && git clean -f -d

Then you can type:

git resetupstream

or

git resetorigin